The subject matter discussed in the background section should not be assumed to be prior art merely as a result of its mention in the background section. Similarly, a problem mentioned in the background section or associated with the subject matter of the background section should not be assumed to have been previously recognized in the prior art. The subject matter in the background section merely represents different approaches, which in and of themselves may also be inventions.
Conventionally, applications have been provided for electronically scheduling meetings between people, such as calendaring applications, etc. Unfortunately, these conventional applications have exhibited numerous limitations. For example, scheduling applications have typically not leveraged, and specifically have been separate from, existing customer relationship management systems. Thus, customer information used for scheduling meetings has generally been required to be imported from other systems or manually entered, thereby slowing the process of scheduling meetings.
Another exemplary limitation includes calendaring systems which do not facilitate the negotiation of meeting times (e.g. such that meeting organizers must use other mechanisms, such as phone, email, etc. for negotiating times), but instead require the organizer to propose a single specific time for the meeting. This dramatically increases the amount of time and effort required to set up a meeting, especially when attendees are typically on different calendaring systems and cannot access one another's free/busy information. In addition, since organizers are oftentimes required to use email to arrange times, the cumulative conversation about a meeting is usually lost in the Inbox and not associated with the meeting. This is problematic if an organizer needs to reschedule a meeting and use time preferences expressed by invitees during the original negotiation.
Another exemplary limitation includes calendaring systems which do not give users the ability to share free/busy information between disparate calendaring systems, such that identifying a specific time to propose the meeting, as described above, is either not based on known availability of the invitees or requires extraneous communications with the invitees to discover their availability. Yet another exemplary limitation includes calendaring systems which do not allow organizers to brand and personalize the invitation experience. Accordingly, a more efficient technique for scheduling meetings having increased functionality over the traditional scheduling applications is desirable.